Index: Una Visione Estesa

Keith Johnson: ‘Most interesting of all is the effortless way in which this series of avant-garde seating objects apostatizes the tyranny of the rectangle that most sofa designs of the period capitulated to. The Torsos work to sublimate those tendencies towards a higher, more expressionistic reality.’

Keith Johnson: [MEMPHIS] ’embodied all of the themes which Sottsass had been experimenting since the 1960’s-1979’s: bright colours, an adoration of cultural kitsch, motifs lifted from suburban life and particularly, cheap mass-market products such as plastic laminates commingled with over-refined materials like marble, rare-wood laminates, silver, gold-leafing, goofy-looking light bulbs, etc.’

Keith Johnson: ‘“Tutti Designers” (“Everyone is a Designer”) is a conceptual wall lamp/neon sculpture with a stenciled metallic suitcase, complete with the obligatory Arte Povera exposed wires and raw metal wall-fasteners. Is the suitcase merely a container for the necessary neon transformer, or a briefcase full of ideas?’

Keith Johnson: The “Privat Lampe des Künstlers II” floor lamp is an attempt to allow the opportunity to decorate a private residence with a rather strange yet wonderful Franz West metal object. This lamp, fabricated of unwieldly-looking iron chain, is absolutely austere in its appearance. Its sole embellishment: a disquieting raw light bulb.

Keith Johnson: As is often the case in great works of art, “Modus Operandi” dormeuse reveals an unplanned yet “controlled” accident – a side-view of the head-rest shows that in the course of pulling the fabric into a French-twist bolster, the woven Freudian words appear to be spinning “uncontrollably” inwards towards the center – a veritable “vortex of the mind” of whomever might be laying there.

Keith Johnson: Lawrence Weiner, a central figure in the formation of 1960’s Conceptual art, is renowned for creating site-specific artwork that encompasses the usage of typographic texts. In this case, a rather normal-looking, Shaker-like desk and bench have been modified with copper-inlaid words and decorations in order to imply a greater sense of gravitas than a desk would normally offer by itself.

Keith Johnson: In this metaphoric object by the American conceptual word artist Lawrence Weiner, the act of creation cannot be performed except by artists who realize creation often starts with failure.